when the docker container starts it thus starts Neo4j itself. And when the docker container exits, Neo4j stops. There should be no read to 'start the db' by running /var/lib/neo4j/bin/neo4j start or similar

We don't know the exact cause, but in our deployment scripts we were automatically upgrading to the latest last supported version of the kernel (centos). Disabling this role in our deployments resolved the issue.